Sweden abandons high-profile scheme after two-year trial finds health improvements for staff but higher wage costs
A high-profile pilot scheme that saw employees in Sweden reduce their working day to six hours has ended without a clear consensus among experts on whether it brought wider benefits for individuals and society.
The two-year trial, involving a large care home, had been watched carefully by international academics and advocates of shorter working weeks. But it was abandoned after the local government in Gothenburg decided that the costs involved outweighed the benefits of greater staff productivity and wellbeing.
The experiment reduced the working day from eight hours to six for staff at the Svartedalens home for the elderly. Employees’ salaries were not reduced but, according to preliminary results, they took 10 per cent less sick leave, they were more productive and patient care improved during the process.
The self-reported health of the 68 carers involved improved by about 50 per cent in comparison to care home workers with regular working hours.
Nurses and carers also began spending more of their reduced working hours on what analysts classified as ‘social activity’ with patients, such as playing games or going for walks.
Lise-Lotte Pettersson, an assistant nurse at Svartedalens, told researchers: “I used to be exhausted all the time. I would come home from work and pass out on the sofa. But not now. I am much more alert; I have much more energy for my work, and also for family life.”
Gothenburg City Council, however, had to hire 17 additional workers during the trial to ensure the home’s residents received the required number of hours of care. This came at a cost of 12 million kronor (£1.37m), which led the council to conclude it was too expensive to continue.
The Swedish national government reported that unemployment costs had been reduced by 4.7 million kronor (£557,000) during the first 18 months of the trial thanks to the additional hires.
Daniel Bernmar, leader of the left-wing coalition at Gothenburg Council, which supported the trial, denied the experiment had been a failure. He emphasised that it “still remains to be seen” whether the economic costs of reduced working hours outweighed the benefits. “The costs of the trial for the public economy were actually half of what we thought they would be,” he told the Guardian.
Bernmar said he was keen to see more studies into whether a shorter working day could result in longer-term gains for society as a whole. He suggested it could allow people employed in labour-intensive professions to extend their working life. “I believe in shorter working hours as a long-term solution,” he said.
A final set of results from the experiment is expected in March. The scheme was the first controlled trial of shorter hours in Sweden in around a decade. The country has a history of experimenting with shorter workdays: from 1989 to 2005, home care service workers in one Swedish municipality had a six-hour working day, but the scheme eventually ended.
Meanwhile, the ideal length of working day has been the subject of debate in France. Right-wing presidential candidate François Fillon has proposed a return to a legal working week of 39 hours in the public and private sectors – up from the 35 hours that since 2000 has obliged employers to pay higher rates or offer time off for additional hours worked.